North Korea Rips Off Call of Duty in New Propaganda Video

The worlds of international politics, propaganda and popular culture have been colliding in a weird and wonderful way over the past few days, thanks to a strange video released to YouTube by the North Korean authorities that combines images of destruction yanked from the videogame Call of Duty with images of the North Korean space program, all soundtracked by a piano version of the 1985 charity anthem “We Are The World.” But don’t go running to YouTube to check it out, because it’s not there anymore — not because of American censorship, but a copyright claim on the game footage from its publisher.

The video — which is still available for viewing here — was posted to YouTube on Saturday by Uriminzokkiri, North Korea’s official propaganda agency, plays out like the dream sequence of one North Korean youth, apparently imagining himself on a space shuttle (tellingly, a shuttle apparently launched by a rocket similar to one tested by North Korea at the end of 2012) circling the globe and revealing a unified Korea below.

These pleasant, boastful images — which practically shout “Look how wonderful our technologically advanced future is!” — are cut short about halfway into the video, as the viewer zooms in to a United States apparently torn apart by explosions and warfare. “Somewhere in the United States,” the captions read in Korean (as translated by The Guardian), “black clouds of smoke are billowing. It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself.”

Whatever the intent of the piece, it’s hard to describe the result as anything except bizarre and lackluster. It’s even possible that Activision did North Korea a favor, in a strange way, by asking YouTube to take down the bizarre, poorly animated video as the reality of watching it turns out to be far less interesting than hearing it described.